I The Liberal Triumph
Arthur Balfour resigned on December 4, 1905. He was the last Prime Minister to surrender office to his opponents without a previous defeat at the polls. But there was nothing quixotic about his action. No election was necessary to confirm the belief, held alike by himself, his supporters and the Liberal Party, that his Government had lost the confidence of the electorate; and the growing insubordination of a large section of his own party provided an added incentive to lay down the cares of office.
So persistent, however, was Balfour’s reputation for political subtlety that his resignation before an election was widely regarded as a move of surpassing dexterity. ‘The Liberal Press,’ in the words of Campbell-Bannerman’s biographer,a ‘was almost unanimous that Mr. Balfour’s resignation was the last of the tricks in the long game of skill, and earnestly exhorted the leader to beware.’ And there can be no doubt that Balfour, apart from his other pressing reasons for resignation, was influenced by the hope that office before the election might prove an embarrassment to the Liberal Party. With a conceit not unusual in those whose party had been long in office, he believed that the country might recoil from the reality of a Liberal Government, headed by Campbell-Bannerman, who was reputed to be unpopular, and made up of the inexperienced men who surrounded him. At the same time Balfour hoped that the rifts in the Liberal Party, particularly that between the ‘Liberal Imperialists’ and the radical wing, might prove to be as deep as, or deeper than, those which reft his own party. Might not Asquith and Grey and Haldane make great difficulties about serving under the Campbell-Bannerman who had talked of ‘methods of barbarism’?
The first point proved to be quite invalid, or at any rate to be submerged beyond recognition in the great wave of revulsion against the union ist Party which swept the country. The second was more substantial, but not quite sufficiently so for any of Balfour’s hopes to be fulfilled. There were unusual difficulties in Cabinet-making, which arose, nominally at least, from questions of persons rather than of policy. Campbell-Bannerman arrived from Scotland on the morning of Balfour’s resignation, and immediately saw Asquith and Grey. He found them ‘very amiable and reasonable on the subject of Ireland and … there was no difference worth thinking of between him and them’.b But later that day Sir Edward Grey again called to see Campbell-Bannerman and informed him that, unless he took a peerage and left the leadership in the Commons to Asquith, he (Grey) would not feel able to serve. Grey’s attitude was that he felt in any event unhappy about joining a Government of which Lord Rosebery was not a member, and that his doubts could only be allayed if one of his own close associates were to be the principal spokesman in the House of Commons; and he had a quite genuine reluctance for office at any time.
This was a heavy problem for Campbell-Bannerman. He wished Grey to have the Foreign Office, and the latter’s defection would leave the Government weak in that field in which it was thought most likely to be distrusted. On the following day, that on which he kissed hands as Prime Minister (in the event he left the King’s presence having forgotten to perform the actual ceremony), his difficulties were eased by Asquith’s unconditional acceptance of the Exchequer; the new Chancellor was clearly not a full party to the ultimatum. But the crisis was not over. On Wednesday, December 6, Asquith came up from Hatfield where, most surprisingly as it now seems, he was the guest of Lord Salisbury, and made a personal appeal to the Prime Minister to solve the difficulty by going to the Lords. Later on the same day Lady Campbell-Bannerman also arrived in London, and more decisively advised ‘no surrender’. After that the Prime Minister was in no doubt that he would not give way.
Grey remained adamant for another twenty-four hours, but Haldane was already wavering, and by midnight on the Thursday they had both decided to come in. After this the filling of offices proceeded normally. The lists were ready for the King on the Sunday, and Ministers received their seals on Monday, December II. It was a day of very thick fog, and the members of the new Government began their periods of office, inauspiciously if not symbolically, by losing their way and groping for up to an hour around the Mall and the incomplete Victoria statue in front of the Palace.
It is now a platitude to say that it was a strong and unusually able Government. On the one hand were men of the outstanding intellectual ability of Asquith, Haldane, Morley, Bryce,1 Birrell,2 and Samuel. On the other, at least equally outstanding, but possessed of gifts differing very widely, not only from those of the ‘intellectuals’, but from those of each other, were Grey, Lloyd George, Mr. Churchill, and the Prime Minister himself. In many quarters the new Ministry was greeted with enthusiasm, and nowhere with derision. On the day after the publication of the lists The Times succeeded in confining its general remarks on the subject to a sullenly non-committal: ‘Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman has succeeded in forming his Ministry’;c but in its immediately previous issue it had remarked: ‘In some respects the Cabinet as it now seems likely to be composed is the best that could be made with the available material, but the Irish appointments1 … inspire the profoundest distrust, and the position in the House of Lords is excessively weak.’d As, however, The Times clearly regarded a record of never having made a partisan speech (in which respect, apparently, only Lord Elgin,2 the Colonial Secretary, was without blemish) and a promise never to implement Liberal legislation as the best qualifications for Liberal Ministers, its strictures need not be taken too seriously.